This does make me wonder how a press corps can be properly fostered which is not beholden to either private or state interests
Austria tried that by forcing citizens to pay for the state media directly instead of tax money, but it pretty much failed because politicians just can’t get their hands off that and so always place their own henchmen into management positions there. Obviously they’re also unwilling to create laws to get rid of that power.
See my thought is to encourage journalists to form their own equivalent of a bar organization and then just fund that to self regulate the industry
Austria has that (with the catchy name Verein zur Selbstkontrolle der österreichischen Presse – Österreichischer Presserat), doesn’t help one bit, except in extreme cases.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Österreichischer_Presserat (no English version available, unfortunately)
I was with you there until you mentioned an industry self-regulating itself. That never works, and the best example for it is the American economy 😵💫
NPR & BBC are probably the closest we’ve got so far - they’re both state funded, but editorially independent (theoretically). There’s still some influence from the government, but it works pretty well.
Edit: public-funded news outlets definitely work best when they’re part of a larger system including other models of governance (like independent non-profits) as well.
Given the entire governance structure of the BBC and many of the senior managers have been stacked with Tory cronies over the last decade I don’t think that’s still true.
